We’ve all accidentally deleted an important file — or forgotten to save a file after typing up a whole page worth of changes. The latter problem is fixed with Autosave in most modern Mac apps, and the former is usually fixable if you have a Time Machine backup setup or if the deleted file was in Dropbox (where you can undelete files or roll back changes to them for up to 30 days for free, from their site).

But what if you manage to delete a file that wasn’t backed up? Or — even worse — what if you wipe your whole backup disk without meaning to? You’re going to need a disk recovery tool, one that can undelete files. I just had this happen to my personal backup disk, and after recovering from my initial panic, took Disk Drill for a spin to see how much it could get back. This time, I wasn’t just testing an app for a review: I honestly needed the app to work.

The good news: it worked, most of the way. Here’s the good, the bad, and the ugly of disk recovery, and how to get the most of your data back if you ever find yourself in a similar situation.

So you want to play games but you don’t want to settle for Windows? Don’t let the stereotypes of the gaming community dissuade you from buying a machine running OS X and don’t feel that you’re going to have to make compromises just to do so. I play games on my Mac and have a great experience doing so, but picking out the right machine can be pretty critical to ensuring an optimum time.

In this article, we’re going to take a look at each of Apple’s Macs and discuss why you might choose them and when you shouldn’t. (more…)

This post is part of a series that revisits some of our readers’ favorite articles from the past that still contain awesome and relevant information that you might find useful. This post was originally published on March 30th, 2011.

One of the great things about Macs is the high resale value they maintain over time. In the last 4 years alone, I’ve never had to pay more than $300 out-of-pocket for a brand-new Macintosh, and that’s because I’ve been able to get the most value from the Macs I’ve sold!

I’ve put together a simple list of everything to consider when you go to sell your Mac. Read on past the break and we’ll look at some steps for getting the most out of selling your Mac.

SSD’s or Solid State Drives are a popular upgrade lately due to the very significant difference they can make to even an older Mac’s performance in real world use. Unfortunately, SSD’s are also still prohibitively expensive for those of us who wish to keep large quantities of media on an internal hard drive.

There are a few workarounds for this, but most rely on an external drive or cloud storage. Alternatively, the following guide will show you how to install an SSD and make use of a larger, standard hard drive in the SuperDrive bay. As far as non-standard upgrades go, it’s not too difficult, but is perhaps not best suited for complete novices and may well void your warranty.

There are plenty of rumours surrounding how to take care of your batteries. I remember people used to say that whenever you buy a new product, you should leave it charging for at least a day, so that the battery gets “used” to having full charge. Some other people say that’s not necessary nowadays since new batteries are designed differently. The truth is, your battery will lose capacity over time; it’s inevitable. What you can change is how fast it deteriorates.

Today we’ll be giving you some tips on how to make your Mac’s battery stay in tip-top shape through a bunch of easy and fast actions like calibration. We’ll also be taking a look at some applications that can help you with this actions, including Watts and CoconutBattery.

When Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) was released, one of the tent-pole features was Time Machine, Apple’s extremely simple, all-encompassing backup solution. With Time Machine, you simply connected your external hard drive, configured a few settings and the utility began backing up your entire computer.

So long as your hard drive is connected, Time Machine continues to make backups on an hourly basis. The hourly backups are consolidated into a single day, every 24 hours and the days consolidated into a week, and so on, as disk space allows.

So your all good, correct? Your data is backed up, you’ve done your job and no matter what happens to your computer, you’ll still have everything in your backup. Well, ideally – yes. In reality, not necessarily.

The entire reason you are backing up your computer is because hard drives fail. A bad drop, a liquid spill, or simply old age, a hard drive will not last forever. So you back up your computer’s hard drive…to another hard drive. Now, if your internal hard drive fails, you have an external hard drive containing a second copy of everything… but as I said, hard drives fail. It’s inevitable. So what to do?

Make triple and quadruple backups? Sure, if you’ve got the time and money, but an easier and more economical solution is simply to check your backups every now and then. Make sure they are running properly, make sure your data is being backed up properly, make sure your the data is not corrupt, make sure you can recover your files properly. A little care and preparation can go a long way.

We Mac users like to scoff at our PC-using peers, what with our lack of viruses, spyware and Internet Explorer. But when it comes down to it, our beloved Macs are simply computers, sharing nearly identical innards as the PC. Though we hate to admit it, our systems can become sluggish and frozen, our memory can become corrupt, and our hard drives can fail. SuperDuper! is an application from Shirt Pocket to help us through those tough times.

SuperDuper! is an extremely simple backup solution for your Macintosh. With a few simple clicks and a bit of patience, you will have yourself a fully bootable carbon copy of your hard drive. What this means is, when and if your hard drive should fail, you can boot from the backup file and run Mac OS X, your files, data, settings completely in tact, just as it were.

With the use of tiny USB flash-drives becoming increasingly common in our lives, it is scary how heavily we rely on these not so reliable storage devices. They can go missing, get stolen, or just pack it in and die. And if you haven’t backed up all your files from it, then this can be really devastating.

But few people remember to regularly backup so here’s an easy tutorial on how to get your computer to automatically backup your flash-drive for you. Following this, you should be able to rest assured that everything is safe. This how-to uses SilverKeeper, a free backup application made by Lacie.

This article will also show you how to make backups happen as soon as you mount your flash-drive using Do Something When, and a basic Automator workflow. Without further ado, let’s get started!

Have you ever tried to hunt down technical information about your Mac? This can be quite the daunting task to someone who isn’t particularly familiar with Macs. But fear not, whether you own a brand new MacPro or a 1997 Apple Quicktake 200, today’s app will tell you everything you need to know about it.

Below we’ll introduce you to an awesomely helpful application called Mactracker. You’ll get to see what it does and learn about why you should download it today and never delete it.

As a follow up to our article on upgrading your Mac’s RAM, this article will outline how to go through the same process to upgrade your hard drive.

We’ll begin with a brief discussion on why upgrading your hard drive will improve your system then move on to the pros and cons of mechanical vs. solid state drives. We’ll conclude with a step by step tutorial on finding and purchasing the right HD for your Mac and point you to some instructional guides outlining the installation process for your specific model.